 Kia ora again. My name is Alina Siegfried and I'm the host of this series, Our Regenerative Future, which is a partnership between Pure Advantage and Edmontillary Fellowship discussing regenerative agriculture in New Zealand, the opportunity where it's at, what we can do to support the movement. So, wonderful to have you here tonight for our fourth episode in this series, where we'll be discussing the community and mental health elements of Regenerag, and we're honoured to have some amazing guests with us this evening. We've got Jono Fru, Sam Lang and Jules Mathews with us this evening, so coming from quorum scents and integrity soils. Again, a quick reminder, if you haven't wrote it in that poll, it'd be fantastic if you can just briefly answer those three questions. So, we've got a sense of who's in the room and how much familiarity you already have with this subject. To give you the background, this topic started rising up for me in the last few years as I've been, I used to work at the Edmontillary Fellowship and I started out by thinking we were going to write some stories about some of our EHF fellows who were part of that community and involved in regenerative agriculture. I ended up leaving shortly afterwards, but still had a lot of interest in this topic and knew that Pure Advantage had been looking at doing some work around soil carbon and from a regenerative agriculture lens. And with the two organisations having worked together before and a lot of crossovers in terms of our goals with leading innovation in New Zealand, Edmontillary Fellowship is a global network of systems thinkers and global leaders working on some of the greatest challenges of our time around food, climate change, technology, social equality and any number of other big hairy issues and with a few farmers in the network as well. So, we got chatting with a few people around the country, started adding a few others, the soil experts, some of the people that were much more clued up on the business case and what ended up was a 15-part content series called Our Regenerative Future, which you can access on Pure Advantage website, which is pureadvantage.org or the Edmontillary Fellowship blog, which is stories.ehf.org. So, that's where you can get the background. Looking at the poll, it looks like most people have either read some or all of the stories in that future already. So, that's wonderful to see that there's some familiarity with the people that we've got on our call, aside from Jules, who's a new addition. And it looks like most people are somewhat or very familiar with regenerative agriculture, which is fantastic. Got a little under half of the people here, farmers or growers themselves, 47% big block of other. It's wonderful that we're attracting people to these series that just have a general interest or a broad, diverse range of industries. So, I'm going to get cracking very soon with some questions, just a few logistics. You'll see at the bottom bar, we've got a Q&A box option. Please do send your questions through there. I'll be asking the panellists questions as they come through. You can use the chat box as well for some general talk around what's going on. And you can also upvote questions. So, if you see something that you really like, or that is similar to a question that you had, you can always upvote that rather than repeating the question. It also gives us a sense and a bit of a pulse as to what people are really interested in around this discussion of community and mental health. All right, I think we will get cracking into this. It's been a wonderful journey for me. My job is a storyteller. And so, I've just learned so much about this topic of regenerative agriculture in the last few months that we've been doing this. And I'm going to let the experts tell you what they know this evening. So, I think without further ado, we will ask our panellists to introduce themselves. We'd love to start with you, Jules. Over to you. Certainly. Thank you, Alina, very much for all you've been providing. It's been really wonderful listening and watching those other podcasts that you've done. To introduce myself, I think first and foremost, I think of myself as a farmer. Farming has been a big part of my life, both in New Zealand and abroad. And I spent probably just over 20 years farming in the States and in Canada. And I came to regenerative practices. It was a fairly natural progression for me and partly through, I think, my own curiosity about farming systems and partly through living in other places where you're exposed to different ideas and different thinking. And then part of that process was, for me, in the 90s, being chosen to be one of a group of people in Washington State that were trained in holistic management through the University and the Savory Institute. So, that was a big part of opening up my mind to different ways of thinking. And then more significantly, I think, was through a personal interaction. And it was on my return to New Zealand and I worked with this lovely chap called Quenton. And one day Quenton said to me, he said, oh, Jules, you're amazing. You're incredible. And I smiled sweetly and thanked him. And he took a rather big breath and looked me in the eye and he said that, you know, you're going through life being a bitch. Excuse my language, but it was in that moment of real directness that I took a big breath and he smiled and he said, you don't get who you are in the world and people don't get to really experience who you are. And he suggested I go off and do a course. So, off I went to do this course and that took my life on another turn which was eight or ten years of working with people in the realm of personal performance and ontological coaching. So, coaching people in their state of being for the sake of producing results in life and really getting to a state of fulfilment. So, that was an interesting journey. And from that, I came around sort of full circle and met Nicole and have since been back in the realm of farming and working as, and I also work as a coach with integrity soils. So, both as a facilitator and as a one-on-one coach with farmers as they make this journey into a transition. And I think the thing that stands out a lot for me is that for people making that mindset shift, which is what regenerative is a lot about, you can't do that without having a corresponding emotional shift. So, yeah, that's where I come from. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you, Jules. And Nicole who you mentioned is Nicole Masters who has also been a very much part of this series and will be featuring on our episode next week on lessons from around the world. Over to you, Jono. Good evening, everyone. I'm Jono Fru. I guess a little bit about my background. I started farming when I was 11 years old. I grew up in a family of cheap dipping contractors and chemical applicators. That's what my stepfather did and my grandfather did. And so, chemicals were just a normal part of my life. And I got used to putting clothes in the washing machine. They come out smelling like the old man's overalls. And it just didn't mean anything to me. It was just normal. And then I started farming when I was 11. Started dairy farming, working every weekend and through the school holidays. And that really kicked off my interest in farming and just the excitement behind bringing together, sort of going through school without having access to being a farmer and understanding what that was and then understanding, after my introduction, that I get to be a mechanic and a plumber and an electrician. Probably shouldn't mention the electrician part, but I get to do all these things. And it just took me out. I just really, really loved it. And so that started my progression in the dairy industry and later in the arable industry and later specialising in chemical application and agronomy. But it was really one moment that when I first started farming, I was earning $130 a fortnight as my first full-time job. And at the time, it was just the most fulfilling, amazing. I got to go fishing after work on the banks of the Waitiki River. To me, it was a dream. One day, I had a friend come to me whose father's farm I worked on was one of my best friends, Pym, and still is to this day one of my good friends. He came to me and said that everyone at the school that I'd left, that he was still at, was taking the miki out of me saying that John, I was never going to be a stinking dairy farmer and he's earning less than $1 an hour. And in that moment of, I guess, upset, I felt like I had to prove myself to the world. All of a sudden, I went from being really driven, really distracted and really disconnected. I became this guy that you could never sit down with and be with because I was too busy being busy. And I had kids through this and got married and my marriage didn't last all that long. I was with my ex-partner for 11 years and really just burnt out my relationship through trying to win this game called farming to prove, you know, subconsciously prove all these people wrong that I'd been upset with for a long time just because of a conversation I had as a 15-year-old boy. And it wasn't until I realised this and through a few other profound opportunities like going from managing a chemical application company here in Canterbury and being known as the town or the local sort of expert in the chemical space to being asked to manage a large organic mixed cropping sheep and beef farm which really challenged my thinking. And through that introduction and that opportunity and then through the grief moments of my wife and children moving away and through those discoveries I made not only about myself but also about the world around me and the ecological world and the biological world. I was just fascinated by what I was discovering and how it affected really every part of my life. When I was farming and trying to win that game I was so stressed. I didn't know it because I thought that that was the way that we had to be as industry professionals. I thought that as a farmer I had to just work all the time to the point where I'd come home at night and I just was not present with my family and I always felt like I'd never done enough. I didn't deserve to sit down. I didn't deserve to even sleep well at night like I used to smoke cannabis to sleep at night because my brain wouldn't stop. And then in discovering all this stuff about ecosystem function and diversity and self-expression through my journey of understanding I was just lit up by what I discovered to be. The term we now use is regenerative agriculture so I now have started a company, a network performance limited where I go out and coach people how to take these ecological principles and the vast forms of them and put them into a practical application that's relevant to the people and what they're dealing with and that's a huge variety and I'm really excited about being here. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that story with us, John. I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to dive into some more of that throughout the hour. I want to hand it over to Sam to introduce herself. Kia ora, Alina. Thanks for having us here and it's nice to be on a webinar with a couple of good friends. I've got quite a different story. I actually grew up in Lower Hut. My mum was a farm girl, married a city boy and so that was kind of my upbringing and split growing up in town there and spending a lot of time with my grandparents and cousins up in Hawkes Bay on hill country farms up there. And it was actually, I was thinking about the questions probably my high school geography teacher helped me realise that there's probably a few people like that that kind of where I started to really develop this interest in kind of with land and people and how they interacted and that was, I suppose I had a connection to Hill Country Hawkes Bay that I always really missed when I was away. Anyway, that evolved into some time at university and a little bit of time in government working in ways that I didn't really enjoy to be honest and I eventually sort of dropped that pathway and went shepherding with my uncle up in Hawkes Bay on the farm that my grandparents used to run and that was a kind of what you'd call a conventional lamb and bull-beef finishing farm there. Still is amazing place. I had an absolute blast for a year and a bit there. Just working with my uncle who's not too much older than me and I suppose there was, I can always have this being grounded at the farm level by itself wasn't quite enough so I ended up doing a little bit of rural leadership stuff and eventually got asked to do a Nuffield scholarship which is an amazing opportunity and I was very fortunate to have that and my question was really for Nuffield you've got to do a project or have a topic of sorts that you kind of travel around the world exploring and mine was how do we support communities to make systems shifts basically. I didn't see Hill Country farming as we knew it continuing on the same trajectory that it was from where I was and I was really curious about how we actually have a really healthy shift because all of these stories about how the 1980s crash and loss of subsidies and that kind of stuff and all the hardship at that time and that was sort of the most recent example I could find of a massive shift in farm systems and communities and yeah on that that was kind of where I was looking at searching for communities that had made or farmers that had made shifts towards a more sustainable farm system of some sort and I didn't have any kind of prescription of what that was it was just you're kind of looking for a sort of an essence or a flavour of what that was and you get a bit of an instinct for it and that was a huge nine months of just intense learning with over a hundred farmers in 19 countries I think was the tally there and I just picked up some really consistent themes and one of them the one that possibly struck home the strongest was the importance of community support when you're going through changes like this and that's really driven a lot of what I've done since the other part of that was what we're talking about here is regenerative agricultural regenerative farming and it goes by a lot of names and labels around the world but that kind of the power of biology and ecology in the hands of a farmer who understands those concepts and functions was achieving some pretty inspiring things around the world so yeah and it was interesting the Duncan one of the guys in quorum sense posted this morning and said he had found a video of my presentation from that scholarship this morning which I've avoided watching for obvious reasons and anyway I ended up watching it just out of curiosity and it was fascinating because all the things I was going on about that I was hoping that we would kind of get into as a country in terms of exploring these the kind of biology and ecology of our farm systems and developing that understanding and the kind of community driven nature by which which is what I've seen succeed around the world that was black and white what I was pretty keen to sink my teeth into and it must have only been a couple of months later that John O'Frew and Simon Osborn and Nigel Green would got together in a farmshed and started quorum sense which is about half of what I do now so it's pretty cool looking back that was only a couple of years ago so I suppose I see myself part farmer part sort of community supporter of sorts in relation to quorum sense and I also do a bit of independent research mostly with Dr Gwen Growlop from Minaki Fenawa who was on here last week so yeah thanks Thank you fantastic that must have been such an incredible experience talking to so many farmers across the space in nine months I'm sure we'll get to dive into that a little bit too just a reminder to everybody on the call that you can submit questions through that Q&A box so feel free to chuck whatever's on your mind into there first up I'd just like to ask all the panellists the question and we're doing this question with all our webinars that's a very it seems like a simple question but there's so many different answers to it what does regenerative agriculture mean to you so Sam perhaps you want to start off Cool thanks I was regretting this a little bit because I've been on the other side of webinars recently asking other people questions like that yeah I suppose the I haven't really thought too hard about that particular question to be honest I mean there's the principles of regenerative agriculture which it sounds like most people are broadly familiar with you know how do we how do we apply human based thinking to understanding how ecosystems and biology functions and how do we develop a farm system that works with that and not against it there's one level there the other level which is kind of the what are the outcomes that you're working towards what are your goals for you and your farm in your community and what I really like about the regenerative narrative or community or whatever you want to call it is it's really broad stretching from your water and your biodiversity and your climate goals through to your community vitality and community support and that through to local food resilience, nutrient density connecting the health of our soils to the health of our food to the people and the kind of rigour that the conversation brings to paying attention to all of those things and not focusing too much on anyone I really really really like so that's at one level that's kind of what it means to me and at another level it's just about communities of farmers and people that support them creatively looking to continuously improve what they're working towards using some pretty exciting new understandings and tools or perhaps not new for some people but new for many in terms of the power of diversity and microbiology and ecological systems when we work with them so yeah that's perhaps I'll leave it there and bow to the wisdom of Jules and Jono for some more articulate definitions Jono would you like to jump in there? Yep sure so what is regenerative agriculture to me so regenerative agriculture to me and again broadly stated because it is such a huge thing is that it's about understanding the impacts of each of your choices that you make with the basis of utilising the natural resources and the natural capital that we all have access to and you know create systems around these but the cool thing with regenerative is is that you're never you're never finished you're never actually fully regenerative regenerative to me is more of a context and we're learning stuff all the time and the really cool thing about regenerative agriculture to me is that community sharing of knowledge and ideas and that's why we started Quorum Sense and how it's been so effective is that you know no longer is it us versus them it's sort of like we're all going to make this and we're all learning together and we're especially not all collectively failing but it's about understanding you know like Sam said that the basic fundamentals of biology and ecosystem function you know really of which if I'm bold enough to say is that we really just are scratching the surface nature is so complex and I said something in a previous interview and now on the homepage of my website it's like going from complicated simplicity to simple complexity yes natural cycles and ecosystem function is hugely complex you know everything we do is has a ripple effect a lot of which we don't actually understand nor do we see but it's about taking what we do understand and working with that to create food production systems and communities that allow everyone to flourish I'm not just talking about human beings you know no longer are we the controllers you know we just really at the helm so to speak you know the rudders being the ecosystem and we're just at the helm controlling what we can control but really the works being done by the rudder that being the biology and the ecosystem itself so once we realise that you know we are not the ones on top we're just part of everything and then how do we go forward with that in mind with nature fantastic thank you Jules what does it mean to you regenerative agriculture well and again it means a number of things but when I think about regenerative if I'm a little bit like Jono and actually I prefer the word regenerating because regenerative denotes that there's an end in mind and there isn't we don't know we don't know how far you know we can go with much of what we're doing because we are just scratching the surface but I think it's a I think of it as a whole system approach to not only ecosystem but also financial personal and community well-being and dynamics so it's it's based in it's principle based and and for us it's measured by outcomes so there are no constraints going into it it's just a matter of measuring the results you're getting to see are you improving those bottom lines you're looking at or not and I think it also needs to be looked at in local context so although the principles can be taken and applied everywhere applying them relative to the context is really a vital piece of it so I think fundamental to it is mindset and what I see over and over and over again is is a mindset that includes curiosity it seems to include a lot of accountability the people I see really who are adopting this are lifelong learners anyway and there's a huge amount of collaboration so I often say that nature is a reflection of us and who we're being and when you look at some of the troubles that we're facing in our natural ecosystems we're also facing a lot of those issues in our bodies as well so I think as far as principles go it's about maximising photosynthesis so we can really enhance ecosystem function through sunlight which is the energy source of everything and really promoting life and that's promoting life on all levels not just human life and human well-being and of course to do that we need to really look at the fundamental one of the fundamentals which is diversity so diversity in all the ecosystems and out of that building resilience and I think we know when we're really regenerative when we've got a syntrophic system at work with that upward spiraling and that upward improvement and where that ends who knows I don't think there is but you know we've been measuring things based on a system that's certainly not functioning optimally so there's a lot of fun in discovering what there is to discover Gotcha, yeah and I'd like to actually before we dive into the questions in the Q&A put that question to Jono you've talked about the shift mindset for you and an improvement in your own mental health so we'd love to just hear a little bit about what was it about regenerative agriculture that caused that shift for you Yeah, cool so there was a few you know there was several things but some of the key parts were I guess going from you know when we're trying to control everything you know like my old life or my history has been to kill whether it be competing you know competing plant species you know fungal attack all these treatments of symptoms and we treat those with huge you know velocity with agrochemicals and tillage and lots of different things to and like doing that there was like a level of subconscious resignation like as Jill said what we're dealing with out there is like really a correlate of what we're dealing with as human beings and so while I was out there controlling the ecosystem trying to get this target that we're promoted to get to by industry is that inside I was also suppressing my self-expression and I was scared to really express that and I'm only just seeing these sort of correlations now in retrospect at the time I was just a grumpy arrogant righteous man that knew better than everyone and that brought on a lot of anger and I kept a lot of people including my friends and family you know out here at arms length just to not challenge me and people that did challenge me I'll tell you what it wasn't pretty and then all of a sudden with the discovery of regenerative agriculture and community and like Jill said diversity across all spectrums that includes input and diversity of perspectives is just hugely vital and when I started letting go of trying to control things and actually being part of something and being open to learning all these different perspectives that Steve Ratins up in the Burns Building at Lincoln there a few weeks ago and we're having a discussion about a few practical things around biology and ecosystem and he said to me what are your credentials and I said I'm not I never got NCA level 1 I never went to university and there was a silence for about 10 seconds and he said he smile he says you're a scholar of life and so the key thing here is curiosity I got this sense of fulfilment and joy from being a contribution to the world so taking my perspective and getting over the fear of sharing that or like the fear of not being accepted for what I had to say and getting over the wanting to have the agreement all the time because it's really when you get down underneath it seems to be we're all after that agreement and it's no wonder we stay the same it's like once you get beyond that and embrace the diversity that we all are that's how we progress so I got to start being a contribution I got to start learning from all these wonderful people you know a lot of people on this call I've got Nicole Masters to thank immensely for in the early days when I started to discover all this stuff and we just started Quorum Sense although now it's a charitable trust at the time it was just a group where we'd just hang out around farms and I got to this point where I was like you know no longer was I going for the farm ownership thing with the family because I didn't have the family anymore I was left with right what am I going to do when I knew contributing felt really good I knew giving felt really good like in any ecosystem or farm system it is all a currency you cannot receive without giving and so when I was faced with what am I going to do here for everyone's information I did stop smoking cannabis and I actually had my heart rate drop significantly like 15 beats per minute on average I started to become present with people for the first time seeing people for who they really were not as the judgment I thought they were in my yucky head of righteousness and arrogance let go of all that and wow I just got to be with people I was having a conversation with Nicole one day the private conversation about I was thinking about going out and starting sharing my perspective as a job as a full time thing and I'm entertaining these thoughts like I'm not greedy and I'm not good enough those thoughts that most of us hold on to before we take action and a lot of us won't take action because of those and thank goodness for Nicole because she was like to me she was like Johnno you're ready now and she's like the world needs you now and I was like okay and so I just went out and just started doing stuff and one foot in front of the other and again just being open to all the things that life throws at you and now I sleep well at night and I have this level of contentment that I've never experienced before and I tell you what I'm more busy than I either have been I used to do 100 hour weeks and complain about how busy I was now I do more than that but I tell you what there's no complaints at my end that's fantastic to hear again thank you for sharing that part of your personal story I love that that idea of being a scholar of life and there's a comment and a question here from Caroline Stewart who said she'd learned more about I guess regenerative agriculture that approach from transforming her own small vegetable garden patch that she did in a four year forestry degree so there's a question of how is regenerative agriculture reaching out to gardeners and sharing what they're learning and how is the community I guess amplifying what's going on Are you asking me that question Alina? If you'd like to answer that's fine but it'd be great to hear from many of the others as well Jules I know you travel around the country a fair bit so you've probably seen a lot of different case examples Yeah I think you know I think is the whole concept of regenerative or regenerating is taking hold not only are farmers interested but certainly a lot of gardeners and integrity soils we've had lots of conversations around this and currently I've been doing a little bit of work with various groups looking at you know how do you roll these concepts out so that they're easily available to people and what are the concepts what are the things that people need to know so that they can go about growing really healthy food for themselves I mean I would like to see more availability of information and certainly maybe some sort of guiding principles whether that's on some webinars or whatever form that takes I mean personally if I had the time to see I'd go around this country doing workshops for gardeners because when you look at like the Second World War you know 50% or 40% of the food in America was grown in home gardens and you know we only need to look at what happened with COVID and you know there were no seedlings left and I can guarantee you a lot of those seedlings probably didn't do very well and it would be lovely to have a nation of people who were really OFA with how do you grow great nutritious food and out of that how do we have a great ecosystem that's really healthy and also we're raising children with smart minds because they're getting good nutrients so yeah quite how to do it I'm not sure but I currently have the role of managing a wee farm out of Wellington and that's one of the things we're intending to do here is have it as an educational place for urban people Absolutely I can tell you my veggie garden is full of the plants that I planted in seedling pots the weekend before lockdown I'm pretty stoked that I took the effort to do that I mean it really also as I can see that it provides those urban New Zealanders with a way to think about regenerative agriculture and think about what's going on in the soil so there's a great question here from Blaise Turnbull how do you think we can better facilitate cross community conversations between rural and New Zealand communities Sam any thoughts on that one or any of the others I mean I think that the food is the connection between the primary conjoint between rural and urban I guess and it's been amazing the conversations that have been sparked with the whole COVID thing in terms of people that have been thinking about local supply all farmers thinking about local supply of food to their local communities or people in town thinking about trying to find direct source food from their farming community but never quite getting to that point and then all of a sudden COVID happens and the incentives there that you've got the time and then everybody's talking about it and there's a whole lot of amazing conversations that have sparked coming out of that I think the food conversations just really fits that it's not necessarily an easy fix in terms of that some of the supply chain there are some things that sit slightly outside of a farmers core skill set or their core knowledge that require different expertise and different skills and different perspectives to come in and help set those things up and I suppose what I'm really enjoying about the regenerative farming community in New Zealand at the moment is again the diversity thing is there's so many people that are just sort of listening in and contributing in their own ways with all of these really very different skill sets to what a lot of farmers have and I'm quite excited about where that's going to go and just on the previous question in terms of regenerative urban gardening or whatever our lawn got a bit destroyed just before Covid so I stole a whole lot of cover crop seed and we took every type of veggie seed that we possibly could and we just sprinkled it out on the lawn with a bit of turf grass and to be honest that's what kept me sane for the eight weeks in Covid because I got to watch this amazing diversity and you're like what's going to come up now and what's not going to come up and just having that sitting out your front door was amazing and we thought all the kale and broccoli had failed but you know six, eight weeks we would seed it, you know a little rain event comes along and suddenly it's just cranking through so I'd encourage anyone to give someone like that a crack and just have a bit of a play in your backyard and see what happens because it's amazing how much fun it is It sounds like a fun experiment Any of the other panellists want to answer that question around the urban rural community I don't want to say divide but yeah making the connection I think it's important to firstly acknowledge that there has become this divide you know much like when I started school and town when I say town, I was bought up and done training at the Waitaki Valley and then went to school in Omoru and the shift from being out in the country and being accepted to all of a sudden going to town and I was like alienated because of my interest in farming that first had me aware of the fact that there was a divide and now like Sam said the common thing is that essentially we all need food and what that looks like is really we all need to be on the same wavelength and because the diversity thing why it's so important is we get to have outcomes that weren't possible without it and so there's a lot of things that even people in urban settings can contribute at a scale that might not be being thought of and vice-versa like back to the gardening thing my grandmother and my grandfather have been on a quarter-acre section for 40 years and they've been growing vegetables there really well, when I say really well they've always had vegetables and when I used to walk into the garden shed at just a stank of chemicals and fertilisers but they always had vegetables and they were always really tasty and then it wasn't until last year after having started serum biosis with Peter Barrett where we were doing cover crop mixes I had a bit of leftover seed and Sam I'm watching you buddy I'm going to have to start hiding my little stashes of seed and anyway my grandmother she used to cover her gardens pre-spuds she used to grow mustard and then hoe that in and then cover the soil with toilet paper not toilet paper newspaper and then I talked to her about the power of diversity and I had this you know, a handful of cover crop seeds and we put it down and it grew and she rang me out and she was like son what is this you know, it's going crazy out here do we need to be spraying this stuff and returning it back into the soil I said no, no just let it do its thing that year after 40 years of growing she had the biggest yield she ever had just by having diversity in pre-spuds and she said they tasted better they stored better and she went away and she was a good gardener got it, okay can I add something quickly to that sure I just think you've both touched on what's really important and there's one more thing which is we don't have a lack of science and a lack of knowledge we actually have a lack of understanding and that goes for both urban and rural people and I think the more we can learn the more we can expand our understanding of ecosystem function whether that be your little square pot in an urban setting or whether that be thousands of hectares of farmland, it's no different so I think it's really important that we all take that on I think that's a really important distinction between knowledge and understanding and if you're someone who's quite new to those kind of conversations that perhaps might come across as a bit newer philosophical so there's a fantastic and really I think important question from Michael Riley here around how farmers who want to make the transition can deal with those social pressures from family and friends the wider community and as he says at pushy sales reps noting that the ridicule can be really intense and of course these are tight-knit social communities that we're talking about so how do you deal with that dynamic? I'll jump on that one so and I've worked with Michael Riley he's a fantastic human being and I know he dealt with this hard in the early stages for being not accepted by his peers not the way he hoped to be and this is the thing is what we've got to remember is the push back and the ridicule remember is that's nothing to do with us and that's where it's really important that you develop that context for yourself or that intention of what you're at to achieve and then just remembering that other people may not carry that same view and when you're in a reductionist mechanical mindset of food production where we're talking monocultures controlling diversity removal rates of nutrients and replenishment what we're talking about here is biological function and speaking to that one specifically like mineral provision it does seem really eerie-fairy and really hard to grasp and you just can't like if someone had said to me when I was a chemical applicator about free nutrients through microbial diversity I would have said get out of town so it's about just getting for yourself clear your intention what you're at to do surrounding yourself with the people to support that and are open to that sort of mindset and don't feel you need to defend yourself to those people like what I invite you to do there guys and Michael you know this is just listen to the concerns of these people make sure that they're heard and there's all of a sudden no defence you don't need to defend what you're doing and then just share with them what you're up to and what you'd like to achieve and that's how we sort of get to encourage and stay stagnant Yeah absolutely and I know Sam you'd mentioned that it was in the communities where there was a lot of support for the farmers that were making these sorts of transitions that seemed to be thriving I wonder if you can speak a little to that Yeah well that was the I suppose the what I kind of stumbled across was farmers that had tried and kind of got knocked back and sort of sunk back to where they were and other farmers that had tried something and you know got through that sort of tricky transition phase and thrived and it was really that was really just the presence of a group of people or a community of people that believed in what they were doing and they didn't actually have to be farmers themselves or have any kind of technical knowledge that could help farmers overcome the technical changes it was actually simply the fact that there was family or friends or a local farming group or an online community of some sort if farmers felt like they were supported then they were far more likely to get through that phase and I mean Johnno's advice there was fantastic and it is quite a sad story that and it's not limited to New Zealand that so many farmers that kind of try something different do get really scorn because of this sort of connection between how you farm and your identity and your community and it's all tied up which is I mean it's a weird human thing and it's extremely common and yeah that's just the if you're making, I suppose that my practical advice is if you're making a start and exploring this kind of thing then make sure you do find yourself a even if it's just a small group of people that you can bounce ideas off and just talk about what you're doing who can now when things don't go to plan or you make a mistake or whatever you know be there to just to help you through it and that's just super important Jules I know you've worked with a lot of different communities around the country so are there any standout examples that you can share of where this has worked well that power of I guess social cohesion and getting the message out there well I think both these guys have covered it pretty well and you know the best demonstration we have in this country is actually quorum sense and how do you collaborate as a group of people and take out of the space any wrong making you know we've developed a society that's all about knowing the answer and you know our importance and our worth is all based around what we know and I think in this regenerative space it's really about being brave to ask the questions and being brave enough to say you know I have no idea and look to others to help guide you and it is it's about collaboration and it's about supporting one another and I think I was just having a conversation this evening before this and it was about a family that have sort of taken on a bit of regenerative approach and dad got really nervous and throughout a lot of nitrogen three times in a row unbeknownst to a son and cause you know some quite serious problems with cattle and and I think we've got to look beyond what the issues are and look at what are our interests and come together in that real collaborative way around our interests because they're always going to be issues we have differing opinions on but that's not where we're going to really be collaborating so I think you know look beyond that and find out what people are interested in and be brave enough to forget the tall poppy thing and actually share because it's one of the things New Zealanders you know are not so good at is we're not so good at sharing ourselves and sharing our vulnerability and our concerns and I think when we do and others are willing to just hear us they don't have to fix our problems they just have to listen and listen with a bit of an open heart really helps I think you're dead right there and that's where I see stories like Jono's being so powerful in terms of other people being able to see themselves and know that people are out there talking about it and that there are different ways to be farming I actually want to jump to a question now that's come through on the Facebook live stream because we're simultaneously live streaming there I mean one thing that's come up a few times as I've been researching this series is there's a lot of overlaps between regenerative agriculture and indigenous world views and relating to the land so there's a question around how are you working with Te Ao Māori on your farms and developing your understanding of titiriti when it comes to the whenua and what it means to you to Pa Ki Ha so does anybody like to answer that one I would love to Elina so to give you an understanding I so me and my twin sister were the first sort of Pa Ki Ha generation of our family and my grandmother taught today all of the schools in the Waitaki Valley and around Omaru voluntary for a few decades and I actually grew up in my heritage and because of the the area that I grew up and didn't allow for that culture that it was like the stereotypical sort of high country sheep and beef sort of environment where there was this view about the Māori people that I was nervous to acknowledge that I was part of and when I realised in recent years the impact that that's had on me and suppressing that I've since now felt this connection and like I've now learnt like my mihi for instance and I'm learning a few things around my history and I'm looking at I have actually been coaching a few people involved in a few iwi up north and for the first time in my life I'm like so excited about about coming back to my heritage and bringing that forward and my children are too which is really exciting It's great to hear that you're on that learning journey either of our other panellists like to speak to that at all Yeah, I guess the the point to where it's got for me personally is with we've got some amazing Māori practitioners that are really good friends with having lots of conversations about the real natural synergy between Tau Māori and the regenerative way of thinking in terms of living systems and things like that but really it's at this stage to be honest there's been conversations we've had some really amazing conversations with Māori landowners there's quite a lot of them going around the country I think the fastest perhaps the fastest segment of people to put it that way are really just naturally grasped what we're doing but I think it's going to express itself in its own way and that's what I'm observing a little bit at the moment but I'd love just to see more of the richness of Māori culture sterling to weave through the work that we're doing and that so looking forward to it Thanks Sam We've got about 5 minutes left in our conversation here this evening did you want to add anything on that topic Jules? I think just briefly I think we all come from different walks of life and different levels of understanding in different contexts and we've lived in a predominantly white western context and I think it's up to all of us, the onus is on us to really listen with the intention of understanding in a way that we never have so that we can really embrace the richness and the fullness of this nation and what was here before us I think that's vital Very well said There's a question from Thomas that I'd like to put to you and I know that this is one that is front of mind for a lot of farmers that are thinking about transitioning but how have the panellists to have fears or anxieties about the output levels per hectare if they apply regenerative approaches to their farming it could be a big scary thing to change everything that you think you knew and try this experiment on your land when your livelihood is at stake so what would you do to allay those fears? If I can jump in there I think firstly people need to develop a little bit of confidence in anything new they are doing so I think there's nothing wrong with taking these principles and applying them on a small portion of your farm so you can actually really start to see what works in my location given my financial situation my constraints and opportunities in my land base and also with regards to my family and my community so I think when people have a really clear path forward they can juggle those things in a way that empowers them and get yourself a good mentor whether that's someone in your location or someone in a different location that you can bounce stuff off it might be another farmer it might be someone who's working in the industry and search out those opportunities like come the farm and what's coming through that where people are starting to get connected Wonderful That's where communities like Quorum Sense are so important I wonder if one of you, Sam or John could just speak to the kind of support that farmers on the Quorum Sense group are providing to one another Yep, okay I think you just got voluntold As pointed so what we do in Quorum Sense is it's really just about sharing our experiences in a new place of like my ways better or you need to do what I do it's more just like here's what I do we all share not just the good but also the not so good and it's about you know like Jules said earlier just about people's concerns being heard and then you get this diversity of well actually I've been in a similar situation to that and this is how I overcame it or you know a lot of the time what people see is something wrong you know we've got to stop doing that because a lot of the time when you get out there and discuss these things and express what you're dealing with often it's actually there's nothing wrong often there's no failure it's just your perspective of what's going on and sharing that and not getting stuck in the of I'm doing something bad or wrong allows us to be fluent and adaptable and resilient to these things that we used to see as issues and again just being a contribution like in the quorum sense everyone's contributing and it's just this you know this energy and you just can't I've never experienced anything like it and people are getting their expression people are getting to be a contribution people are getting to learn so much just from all this diversity and that's what quorum sense was started for and just to add to that I suppose that at the moment a lot of quorum senses is online mostly the Facebook page is what most people connect to but our goals as a group are very much to get kind of tie back into a little bit of how quorum sense started in terms of back in the field and running events and that person to person stuff but also just trying to create multiple forms of engagement for everyone so there's kind of what quorum senses now and kind of where we're hoping to head so we're working on that one and we've got a link to the quorum sense Facebook group in the chat window if you want to check that out we have reached the top of the hour now so I think we're going to draw it there we've got a few more questions in the chat window so we might look at seeing if we can address some of those on social media perhaps this week on the pure advantage Facebook page you can follow them on Facebook or on Instagram check out quorum sense as well very cool active community community fellowship is also on Facebook also Twitter I think both and EHF also has a really active YouTube channel as well where you can see all of the previous recordings of this webinar series as well as a bunch of other webinars and videos from that community of global thinkers not just on Regeneg but on a lot of different things you can also catch the recordings of these webinars on the pure advantage website as well thank you so much for joining us this evening next week we have a lunchtime session again so we're alternating between evenings and lunchtimes to try and accommodate both speakers in the US and also of course farmers who are out there doing it during the day so next week we've got lessons from around the world we've got a packed panel next week with four amazing speakers we have got Aaron Crampton who has grown up in the Canadian Prairies in Manitoba so she'll be speaking a little bit about her experience Sam will be joining us again next week and we can dive a little more into his journeys around communities around the world Nicole Masters who we discussed earlier who's now based in the US and also based in the US is Celine Diaris who's a bit of a community weaver over there and there's a real connector between the different aspects of regenerative agriculture so thank you so much for joining us all this evening it's been a fantastic conversation and thank you again to our speakers for being so gracious with your time and so generous and wonderful to have you all here tonight thank you we'll see you next week bye